Society

A slave mortgage was a financial instrument used by financiers wherein money was lent on the basis of the value of enslaved people. There are records of slave mortgages in the United States and in South Africa. According to scholar Bonnie Martin, "the time lag between the recording of mortgages and foreclosures, when added to the dispersed nature of the mortgage recording process, made this financial engine relatively invisible, allowing potentially large economic and human consequences to remain unrecognized." As historian Calvin Schermerhorn put it, slave mortgages "drew equity out of [slave] bodies to reinvest in [sugar] refinement technology and more enslaved workers". Settlers fleeing a slave mortgage crisis was one of the precipitating factors of the American colonization of the Republic of Texas in the 1830s.

Evolve Bank at its peak managed around $10 billion for financial technology firms, but it is in turmoil following the collapse of middleman Synapse.

WSJ got rare access to a criminal enclave in the Philippines from which gangs targeted people around the world, including Americans.

America loves jocks, and that's why we don't have any good engineers... or something.

Voters looking into the new candidate are interested in what he has to say, but that’s different from banking their votes.

It's Real and It Works

Having a good set of (working) headlights is a crucial feature of any motor vehicle, assuming you want to be able to see the road ahead of you when there’s a lack of sunshine. Headlights are …

When we first learn about money and banking in high school or university, we are all taught that money has three functions: medium of exchan...

What follows is an essay on how my thinking on bitcoin has changed since I began to write on the topic starting with my first post in Octob...

Musk got the only thing that he wanted. Does Trump realize it?

The agency has been getting played for years, but is reluctant to change.

The U.S. Postal Service loses money because of stifling rules and a mandate to serve the entire country. Privatization would only raise costs and reduce service.

While I now like dogs — hi, Sadie Michel — I wasn’t really a dog person until I met Mr. Gibbs, who out of nowhere captured my heart. He very quickly became my dog-son. Gibbs was a black toy poodle …

In 2004, critics demanded better than mediocre Christmas movies. Why are we so reluctant to do so now?

“Why on earth would you brag to your users that you've partnered with a bunch of protofascists?"

Hypervigilance adapts one to living in an abusive situation.

Spotify’s plot against musicians

If this situation has you questioning whether anything you read on the internet is real, well, that's the right response to have.

This will be the last Friday you'll receive a Second Breakfast newsletter in 2024. I'm not writing my usual "year-in-review" series either, as easy as it could have been to just copy-and-paste "artificial intelligence" a thousand times over and call it good. Paid subscribers will continue to hear from me

By the end of World War II the world had changed forever, as nuclear weapons were used for the first and – to this date – only time in anger. Although the use of these weapons was barel…

Mysterious, misunderstood, and wholly underrated, the Concord is as delicious as it is fascinating.

Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce

This remarkably prescient document holds several lessons about how to run foreign policy.

Republican objections to these investigations tell us something about their cynical worldview.

Experiments by Anthropic and Redwood Research show how Anthropic's model, Claude, is capable of strategic deceit

The film’s representation of sex workers as deserving of respect is a quiet, radical act.

What do we mean when we talk about 'femicide'? Why is femicide linked to ecocide?

If you’re a Trump Voter, the Answer may Surprise you. What Trump Supporters think tariffs are For nearly a decade now, Donald Trump has been promoting tariffs as a tool of choice for solving America’s economic woes, at one point calling them “the greatest thing ever invented.” He has made them a central point of...